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Abstract
The
current scientific framework for the investigation of consciousness is
the end-result of the Western intellectual tradition. It is shown that
this tradition can be re-examined in terms of the Hindu concept of jnani,
and that this approach could form the basis of a first-person science
of consciousness. Electronic arts practitioners are presented as those
who carry out a systematic inquiry into the subjective, and are well-equipped
to contribute to the debates on consciousness.
Keywords: consciousness, philosophy, jnani, Hinduism, third-person
science, first-person science.
Introduction
At the 2nd 'Towards a Science of Consciousness' conference in 1996 I sat
next to a brain surgeon who remarked that most of the speakers were on
the wrong track: he could tell them how consciousness is produced.
As a brain surgeon he knew the precise combination of chemical and neurophysiological
conditions in which a patient was conscious, and those in which they were
not. This is a materialist, non-dualist viewpoint which regards consciousness
as an emergent phenomenon. Previously consciousness was regarded by the
materialists as an epi-phenomenon, or by the dualist philosophers such
as Descartes as independent of matter, and brought into relationship to
it via God. Since the ascendance of science such dualism became intellectually
untenable, and a scientific investigation of consciousness thought unfeasible
until the late 20th C. The 'new' physics (primarily quantum theory) has
made it possible to re-open the debate, because of a new emphasis on the
observer in scientific experiment.
However at the heart of the debate is the question whether consciousness
is open to scientific investigation at all. The difficulty can be expressed
as the 'zombie problem' where the zombie is defined as: 'a behaviourally
indiscernible but insentient simulacrum of a human cognizer' [1]. The zombie has been a useful tool
in consciousness studies, partly as a theoretical point of reference,
and partly because engineers can go ahead and build one in the hope of
analysing its point of departure from the human. Others believe that it
is only a special property of the human brain that gives rise to consciousness,
perhaps related to quantum mechanical effects in the microtubules [2]. The reverse-engineered zombie, and the quantum investigations
are just two approaches to the understanding of consciousness, but whatever
the results, they will tell us nothing about consciousness as we know
it from the inside. It is an awkward but irreducible fact that only
one's own consciousness is available for direct investigation in other
words every one else is a zombie. All the usual reasons for attributing
consciousness to others empathy, common sense, even love fail the criteria
for acceptance as scientific evidence.
My thesis is that consciousness is a suitable subject for a first-person
science, a science of the subjective, and not for a third-person science
[3]. To explore this proposition
I shall examine the Western intellectual tradition from an Eastern perspective,
using the concept of the jnani.
Background concepts
In ancient times and up to surprisingly recently, the Western intellectual
tradition was bound up with religious thought. The key distinction in
religious matters I am introducing for the purpose of this discussion
is between the devotional and the non-devotional orientation, and I will
use the Indian terms bhakti and jnani to cover these. The
British medieval mystic Richard Rolle is an example of bhakti,
while the Buddha is an examples of jnani. The characteristics of
a jnani include an emphasis on knowing rather than loving, on enquiry
rather than surrender, on doubt rather than faith, on will rather than
abandonment; possibly non-theistic rather than theistic, and possibly
via negativa rather than via positiva. (The latter terms
are used in mysticism to distinguish spiritual paths that respectively
deny the material world or embrace it.)
Religions are founded by charismatic individuals such as Christ, Mohammed,
Buddha, Krishna and so on. The orientation of such men, either bhakti
or jnani, has a profound effect on the type of religion they leave
behind, and will influence the kind of religious language that the faithful
can use as part of their tradition. Christ was bhakti, Buddha was
jnani. Hence for a jnani such as Eckhart, born into a bhakti
religion, it was difficult to use the Christian language to express his
own insights, and he ran into trouble with the Roman Catholic church.
When we speak of the Buddha, Eckhart, or Krishnamurti as jnani
we are talking about the geniuses of this orientation. However I believe
that all people, whether admittedly religious or firmly secular, have
one or other of the two orientations, jnani or bhakti. It
is the person of the jnani orientation who doubts, questions, and
thinks, and, given the right intelligence, education and milieu, will
become a contributor to a culture's intellectual tradition. The fully
developed jnani is very different from the intellectual however,
but at the same time I do want to stress that I consider the bhakti
to contribute as much, if not more, to society as the jnani.
Patanjali and Eastern traditions of thought
Using the previous terminology Hinduism contains luminaries of both jnani
and bhakti persuasion, but we will consider a single important
jnani text in the Indian tradition, the Yoga Sutras of
Patanjali.
Here are the first five stanzas:
Now the
discipline of Yoga.
Yoga
is the cessation of mind.
Then
the witness is established in itself.
In
the other states there is identification with the modifications of the
mind. [4]
Patanjali is codifying and summarising a knowledge that already had a
long history, and in the first five lines reduces the system to its essence.
To condense it even further:
Yoga is the cessation of the identification with the modifications of
the mind.
The remainder of the Sutras forms a systematic exposition of this proposition,
and lays out a method for its practice and achievement of its goal. What
is radically different in yoga to any Western tradition is the suggestion
that cessation of mind is the route to knowledge. In Zen the doctrine
of no-mind is also central to its teachings. However, despite the anti-intellectual
implication of this starting point, both jnani Hinduism, and all
the forms of Buddhism, have generated vast literatures which have shaped
the intellectual traditions of the far East.
The following sutras are important as they touch on epistemology:
The modifications
of the mind are five. They can be a source of anguish or non-anguish.
They
are right knowledge, wrong knowledge, imagination, sleep and memory.
Right
knowledge has three sources: direct cognition, inference, and the words
of the awakened ones.
Direct cognition
for Patanjali and the sages of the East means a knowing of thing from
the inside, using techniques broadly referred to as meditation.
Inference is common with the West; it means any knowledge derived from
rational thought. The 'words of the awakened ones' has no credibility
in the West outside the traditions of faith, mainly because of the obvious
problem: who is to say which speaker is enlightened and which not? However
for an enquirer into truth in a tradition such as Buddhism, the seeker
is encouraged to test his or her own direct cognitions against those of
the 'enlightened ones'. The interplay between Master and disciple in Zen,
for example, is an illustration of this.
Jnani and the Western Intellectual Tradition
If we now ask why the intellectual traditions have developed so differently
in West and East, we can identify three related points of departure: Greek
thought, the dominance of Christianity, and the rise of modern science.
Taking the Greeks as the first point of departure from the East, we can
formulate this as the difference in emphasis between what we now understand
as philosophy, and what is jnani. When we look at Heraclitus
or Pythagoras for example, we find many similarities with jnani
writings from Hinduism. The central figure in this context is Socrates
however, and I have made a detailed study of the proposal that Socrates
wasmore like a well-developed jnani such as the Buddha, than a
philosopher as we now understand the term. [5] There is not space here to go into the details of the argument,
but two pieces of evidence can be mentioned: Socrates's 'fits of abstraction',
and his equanimity, or even joy, in the face of death. If we interpret
the 'fits of abstraction' from the Eastern perspective as a type of samadhi,
then much of Socrates's behaviour becomes clear, and of a pattern shown
in many jnani's lives.
Some see the early intellectual debate in the West to be between Plato's
mysticism and Aristotle's logic, but my analysis emphasises more the divergence
between Plato as a philosopher and Socrates as a jnani. The West
has not previously made this distinction, with the result that philosophy
became a formal system of thought divorced from the spiritual, but conducive
to the rise of science. We can say that Socrates taught from a first-person
epistemology, a direct cognition, while Plato developed a theoretical
system, partly based on Socrates's teachings.
Some commentators believe that the dominant religion of the West could
have derived from Socrates, who is compared to Christ in his teaching
manner, and in his persecution and execution, though from our analysis
Socrates is a man of the jnani orientation and Christ of the bhakti
orientation. There are many contributing factors to the dominance of Christianity,
but perhaps the most important one was the initial apologist in each case
Plato for Socrates and St. Paul for Christ. Paul was probably less intellectually
gifted than Plato, but his success in the initial propagation of Christianity
lay in his appeal to ordinary people. Plato's diluted Socratism appeals
to the rulers and intellectuals, while Paul's Christianity appeals more
widely to the poor and suffering, and to those whose bhakti orientation
was touched by the suffering of Christ.
However, the initial bhakti nature of Christianity gave an insufficiently
broad basis for a religion of the West, and the jnani element was
grafted on from the Socratic source, creating a tension that dictated
much of European intellectual history. Plotinus (AD 204-270) is an important
member of the neo-Platonist tradition in the West, and is considered to
be Plato's apologist or successor, but on close scrutiny (again from an
Eastern perspective) we find that he is a jnani in his own right,
who happened to usethe vocabulary of Plato to express his own ideas. Like
Descartes and Spinoza, considered to be the founders of modern philosophy,
Plotinus is evaluated for his formal contributions to philosophy, but
analysing the work of these intellectuals from the jnani perspective
gives a quite different view of their role.
Going back to Plato we could say that his impact was to prioritise ratiocination,
or the dialectic process, over meditation, and so this became the dominant
mode for the intellectual investigation of consciousness in the West.
Descartes, with his cogito ergo sum, locked the West into giving
primacy to thought over all other experience. We can say that the West
is characterised by ratiocination and mind, whereas the East is characterised
by meditation and no-mind. Patanjali considers both to be routes to correct
knowledge, but the East has prioritised one, and the West the other.
The Scientific Method
The devotional nature of the dominant religion in Europe could not give
free reign to its jnani-oriented thinkers, who began to turn to
empiricism, that is observations of Nature, as a way of legitimising their
instinctive tendencies to doubt and enquiry. One half of the Renaissance
was preoccupied with neo-Platonism, but the other, epitomised perhaps
by Leonardo da Vinci, turned its back on the past and put its energies
into a nascent science. Galileo's disagreement with the Roman Catholic
church symbolised the parting of science and religion in Europe, which
gave the jnani-oriented individual the impetus to abandon religion,
though the complete secularisation of Western culture took another three
centuries.
Third-person science is a consensual one, that is data leading to scientific
conclusions are in the public domain, and in principle there is nothing
stopping anyone from repeating the experiments that led to the conclusions.
In third person science the first person is the object under investigation,
the second person is the scientist, and the third person is any one else
who can corroborate the measurements and conclusions of the second. When
Galileo published his results it was open to any one with a telescope
and some patience to confirm. Although the initial reaction to his discoveries
was hostile, it was only a matter of time before 'reasonable' people were
convinced, because confirmation was relatively easy.
What then is a first person science? At this point it is not much more
than a suggestion by the British mystic Douglas Harding [6],
but clearly the work of the great jnanis, East and West, can be
examined for a basis. All that can be said now is that in principle it
simply replaces the object of the third person enquiry with the subjective
world of the investigator.
Conclusions
In so far as the arts are a systematic enquiry into what is, they are
more like a first person enquiry than a third person enquiry, because,
although the theme of the artwork may be external and material, the real
enquiry is into the subjective response of the artist to the subject matter.
Practitioners of the electronic arts are in a good position to engage
with a first person science of consciousness because, though artists,
they are naturally disposed to science and technology. (I have explored
some of these issues in arts and science [7], and also cyberspace
[8].)
The brain surgeon suggested that the brain produced consciousness. If one
was to suggest that a flute produces music, because a skilled flute-maker
can give the precise mechanical conditions under which music can or cannot
arise from the instrument, it would be absurd. Yet what if consciousness
was as independent of the brain as the music is of the flute? After all,
can you remember ever having been unconscious?
References
[1] Moody,
T.C., 'Conversations with Zombies', Journal of Consciousness Studies,
Volume 1, No. 2 1994
[2] Penrose, Roger, Shadows
of the Mind - A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, Oxford
University Press, 1994
[3] King, Mike, 'From Schroedinger's
Cat to Krishnamurti's Dog Mysticism as the First Person Science of Consciousness'
in Consciousness Research Abstracts, proceedings of the "Tucson
II" conference (Journal of Consciousness Studies) Arizona: University
of Arizona, 1996, p,141
[4] Rajneesh, B.S., Yoga -
The Alpha and the Omega, Rajneesh Foundation, Poona, 1976.
[5] Master's dissertation, University
of Kent at Canterbury, 1996, unpublished.
[6] Harding, D.E. The Near
End - The Science of Liberation and the Liberation of Science, Shollond,
Nacton, Ipswitch IP10 OEW
[7] King, Mike, 'Concerning the
Spiritual in 20th C Art and Science' Leonardo, Vol. 31, No.1, pp.
21-31, 1998
[8] King, Mike, 'Concerning the
Spiritual in Cyberspace', in Roetto, Michael (Ed.), Seventh International
Symposium on Electronic Art, Rotterdam: ISEA96 Foundation, 1997. p.
31-36
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